Broadband Cable Access

Coaxial cable networks have been widely deployed to distribute television services using broadcasting technology. This infrastructure has been enhanced and developed into a Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) architecture with the introduction of a return channel. The industry is now deploying digital television services, high-speed data services, Internet Protocol (IP) voice and other time-critical multimedia services across these broadband cable television networks.

These services are delivered using the DOCSIS and IPCablecom protocols. DOCSIS® is a data communication protocol for the transparent transmission of IP traffic across the HFC infrastructure. IPCablecom has been developed to deliver telephony and other Quality of Service (QoS) enhanced, secure, IP multimedia, time critical communications services, using packetized data transmission technology on a HFC data network utilizing the DOCSIS protocol.

ETSI’s Technical Committee CABLE is responsible for the creation, development and maintenance of standards related to integrated broadband cable and television network technologies.

The cable industry is a global market and therefore ETSI’s cable standards are developed to align to the extent possible with standards either already developed or under development in other regions. The ETSI specifications are consistent to the extent possible with the CableLabs®/PacketCable™ set of specifications as published by the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE).

ETSI’s standardization activities for the cable industry are handled in Technical Committee Cable, which is responsible for new standardization initiatives as well as the maintenance of ETSI’s existing cable standards.

In recent years we have achieved major milestones with the publication of a suite of standards describing DOCSIS 3.0 (EN 302 878 series) and IPCablecom 1.5 (TS 103 161). DOCSIS 3.0 provides for advanced features including the ability to bond multiple channels together and support for IP version 6, while maintaining backwards compatibility with the first generation (ES 201 488) and second generation (ES 202 488).

TC CABLE has also produced standards for DOCSIS 3.1, which will enable cable broadband customers to achieve data rates up to 10 Gbit/s downstream and 1 Gbit/s upstream.

In the past few years the focus of ETSI's TC Cable was on enabling the transition to IPv6, on the electromagnetic environment and on energy management for cable networks, in response to European Commission (EC) Mandate 462 (M/462) on energy efficiency in information and communication networks.

Access, Terminals, Transmission and Multiplexing (ATTM); Integrated Broadband Cable and Television Networks; IPCablecom 1.5; Part 2: Architectural framework for the delivery of time critical services over Cable Television Networks using Cable Modems